TY - JOUR
T1 - Differentiation between wild and domesticated Ungulates based on ecological niches
JF - bioRxiv
DO - 10.1101/629188
SP - 629188
AU - Hendrix, Elke
AU - Vos, Rutger
Y1 - 2019/01/01
UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/05/07/629188.abstract
N2 - The domestication of flora and fauna is one of the most significant transitions in humankind’s history. It changed human societies drastically with alterations in biodiversity, atmospheric composition and land use. Humans have domesticated relatively few large animals and all of them belong to the Ungulates, though they are only 15 species of the ±150 that the entire group comprises. This can partially be explained by behavioral and life history pre-adaptations, e.g. social group structure, mating behavior, parent-young interaction, feeding behavior, and response to humans. The other dimension of proposed pre-adapatations concerns the biomes from which domesticated Ungulates originate. Here we test whether environmental preferences i.e. niches and related niche traits, differentiate between wild and domesticated Ungulates. We used three methods to determine the niche dimensions for each species and calculate overlap in niche space between them. Two methods are based on MaxEnt ecological niche models and one method uses raw occurrence data. Our results show that there is no weighted combination of environmental traits that clusters all domesticated Ungulates to the exclusion of all wild ones. On the contrary, domesticated Ungulates are overdispersed in niche space, indicating that the major pre-adaptations for domestication are not directly related to the abiotic niche. However, phylogenetic generalized linear modelling of selected niche dimensions does predict domestication significantly. We conclude that further research of other traits is needed.
ER -